SAS9211-8I 8PORT Int 6GB Sata+sas Pcie 2.0

Product Information

I went for the 9211-8i for 270 CHF as I don't have a PCIEx4 on my motherboard (wouldn't have been great to waste the PCIEx16 slot for a x4 card) and the price difference between the 4i and the 8i and my budget wasn't too big. Using sas2flash (a.k.a. sas2flash.exe, sas2flsh.exe, sas2flash.efi - they all have identical commands)

The best option was to get LSI SAS 9211-8i, which is a PCIe x8 card for RAID, but it can be converted into IT mode to use JBOD (just bunch of drives). There are two ports on the card and each port creates 4 SATA ports, which means I can have eight additional dedicated SATA ports. Ok, I read that error has to do with my BIOS being UEFI and then I read about another way of doing it using sas2flash.efi: Use LSI's **P5 EFI** flasher for this step. If your board doesn't have EFI, then the P5 MSDOS flasher should work and I've included that in the zip file as well. Reboot (should be much faster now in IT-mode) and if you want get into the card's BIOS => it should look very different compared to before.If you want to keep using the IR-mode and are happy with the firmware's version then you don't have to do anything. Disclaimer & warning FLASHABLE SOFTWARES ("BOOT ROM/BIOS" AND "FIRMWARE"): Confusingly, the 9211 cards have their flashable files in *two* parts. There are bios and efi "roms" that provides boot-time options, and these are * separate* files independent from the "firmware" (the part that actually controls the disks and responds to the OS). For the boot roms one can flash a BIOS orom, an EFI boot rom, or neither or both (as they can coexist). Copy Shell_Full.efi to the tools directory and rename it to ‘shell.efi’. Copy these three files – sas2flash.efi, 2118it.bin and mptsas2.rom to the root directory, so the structure looks like this: sas2flash -c CARD_ID -list - provides full details about each card (current firmware, bios, versions, sas ID, manufacturer, whether IR/IT, etc.) Took me 6 hours to figure out all this (I always tried to ignore as much as I could about UEFI and SecureBoot). Linux

Installed the LSI 9211-8i card in the PCI-e slot. Started the old computer up and it booted into DOS. Create the sub-folders for EFI boot. In the web there are two different structures: /boot/efi and /efi/boot. For time saving I’ve created both groups, it works. The reason we use the P5 flasher here and in the next step is that the newer flashers are configured not to work with anything except LSI-branded cards and firmware, so until a few more steps are done, this is the flasher we have to use. Once we've got the card off Dell and onto LSI IT firmware (of any version, however old) then we can switch to using the latest LSI flasher without problems. After finding some PDFs with various bit of info on LSI’s range of host bus adapters (HBAs) I thought I would bring them here to help anyone looking at using one. LSI HBA cards are great way to add fast storage beyond the motherboard supplied SAS and SATA ports. A LSI HBA is a simple disk controller and is great for adding well supported, reliable and low cost SAS and SATA ports to a server. One additional benefit of the LSI HBA line is that you can pass disks directly through to the OS, without needing a RAID layer. This is important for advanced storage systems such as ZFS where you do not want hardware controllers to interfere. These LSI HBA’s often come in configurable Firmware options ie IT for JBOD only, or IR mode for simple RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 10.) Another key benefit is that the LSI HBA lineup tends to be very popular with OEMs such as IBM, HP, Dell, Oracle, Fujitsu, Intel, Supermicro and others, so driver support is generally strong regardless of the OS you are using. Before giving the detailed steps and commands to use, here is an overview of what we will be doing. It will give an understanding of the actual crossflash process, and why the "recipe" below is as it is.IBM ServeRAID M1015 similar to LSI 9240-8i but the ServeRAID M1015 does not support RAID 5 unless you add the ‘Advanced feature key’ to enable it